As you may have read on my previous post, I performed a hard reset on my Samsung Note 3 on Friday night. I have had the Note 3 just over 3 months and this is the first time I have undertaken this exercise.

I did this to see if I could get my new Chromecast to work. I also thought after 3 months of installing and trying new apps and just recently updated to android kitkat, that a hard reset wouldn’t be a bad idea to flush out any crap.

The hard reset and formatting of the memory card takes only a few minutes, although the first attempt of erasing/formatting the memory card caused the Note 3 to soft reset by itself. The second attempt was fine. And then hard reset the Note 3, and was left with a baron phone. Mind you can you call a Samsung phone baron!

Anyway, that’s the easy part. Unlike restoring an Apple iPhone which is a totally seamless exercise, the process via Google was painfully slow. In fact, I left the phone downloading the apps and games overnight. I was up at 4.30am and it was still had more to download and install. Then by around 8.30am all 164 apps/games were installed with all logins and passwords and my custom layout back to its state from the night before. All in all, it took 12 hours.

The good news I’m left with 2gb more internal storage. And my custom setup is back.